“For each of us, then, the challenge and opportunity is to cherish all life as the gift it is, envision it whole, seek to know it truly, and undertake -with our minds, hearts, and hands- to restore its abundance. It is said that where there’s life there’s hope, and so no place can inspire us with more hopefulness than that great, life-making sea -that singular, wondrous ocean covering the blue planet.”
I am a spatial and fisheries ecologist and environmental data scientist interested in how relationships within and among species inform how we should manage marine ecosystems and resources under a changing climate. I am a postdoctoral researcher at the Northwest Fisheries Science Center at NOAA in Seattle, WA. Previously, I completed my Ph.D. in Steve Gaines' lab at the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management at the University of California, Santa Barbara. I use a combination of computer modeling, data science, and empirical approaches to investigate how species interact with their environments, how populations distribute in space and time, and how interactions between species like competition and predation combine with human pressures to determine the structure and function of marine ecological communities.
My research has taken me from my childhood home in New England, to the Philippines and Indonesia, the Caribbean, California, and Washington. Along the way, I have studied large, industrial fisheries like New England's iconic cod fishery and the west coast’s Dungeness crab fishery; small-scale, artisanal and subsistence fisheries in the developing tropics; and human-environment interactions in California kelp forests. I have worked with non-governmental organizations, federal agencies, and university researchers to help guide fisheries management, as well as inform the conservation of iconic species like large baleen whales and sea otters. I believe that marine resources are essential to human well-being, but that appropriate stewardship of those resources requires an understanding of our cumulative impact on the oceans. We are one (powerful) force among many that interact to structure the marine environment, and it is our responsibility to learn where we fit to ensure that the resources we glean from the ocean will benefit future generations.